The relationship between language and symbolic gesture was studied in nine children (ages 18-32 months) who were in the lowest 10 percent for language production for their age. Subjects performed like language-matched controls on a lexical production task. On a syntax-related task, they performed like age-matched and significantly better than…

Speech samples of 14 normal 2-year-old children and 14 Down's Syndrome 5- to 12-year-old children were analyzed to investigate the structural complexity. Results from the Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure indicated that even when matched with normal children for mean length of utterance, Down's Syndrome Ss produced less syntactically…

Although child maltreatment has often been described as leading to language deficits, the few well-controlled investigations of language acquisition in maltreated children have focused on language content rather than form, or have used qualitative rather than quantitative measures. This study examines syntactic complexity in 19 maltreated and 14…